Canada's defence minister David McGuinty made the first visit by a member of the federal government to Luxembourg in 81 years, talking Ukraine, NATO procurement and the €150bn SAFE programme that Ottawa has just joined.
Luxembourg has taken its first visible step toward modernising air-traffic control at Findel. On 22 May 2026, Minister Yuriko Backes and ANA director Andrea Drescher inaugurated a full-scale mock-up of a future "hybrid" control tower, combining a controller's direct view with high-resolution video and detection overlays. It is the first concrete piece of the EUR 1 billion airport masterplan running toward 2032.
Luxembourg's Defence Minister Yuriko Backes presented a roadmap on 20 May 2026 raising military spending by 0.1 points of GNI annually to 2.3% (EUR 1,665 million) by 2029, an incremental first step toward NATO's 5%-by-2035 pledge. The national finance council puts the cumulative extra cost at EUR 13.4 billion, with annual spending set to nearly quadruple. Backes rejected an "arms race" framing.
Luxembourg, the German Länder of Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate, and France's Grand Est say a joint study has confirmed a direct Luxembourg-Saarbrücken-Mannheim railway is feasible "in principle," while flagging technical, legal and financial hurdles that push a regular service to the mid-2030s at the earliest. With 276,360 cross-border workers crossing daily in 2024, the partners are weighing shorter-term fixes too.